The present invention relates generally to electric vehicles, and more specifically, to a battery recommendation system of an electric vehicle.
The development of electric vehicles has gained interest due to an increased awareness in environment protection, fuel conservation, and energy independency. The range of an electric vehicle, i.e., the distance the vehicle can travel between charges, depends on, among other things, the weight of the vehicle. However, the weight of the typical vehicle battery is a large portion of the overall vehicle weight. Every additional kilogram of the battery is additional weight that affects the energy consumption of the vehicle. Consequently, the range of a vehicle does not necessarily increase linearly with the size or the weight of the battery. That is, doubling the size or weight of the battery does not necessarily double the range of the vehicle.
Some examples of electrical vehicles are the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, the Tesla Roadster, the Renault Fluence, and the Nissan Leaf. The Mitsubishi i-MiEV uses a 16 kilowatt hour (kWh) Li-ion battery, has a total weight of 1080 kilograms (kg) (without passengers) and can travel around 100 kilometers (km) based on the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cycle, which is a standard for U.S. driving patterns. The efficiency of a vehicle battery may be measured according to the specific energy. Specific energy is defined as the energy per unit mass (e.g., Wh/kg). Accordingly, the battery of the Mitsubishi i-MiEV has a specific energy of 80 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg) and thus weighs around 200 kg. The Tesla Roadster has a 53 kWh Li-ion battery, weighs 1235 kg and can travel 393 km on one charge (based on U.S. EPA combined cycle). The Renault Fluence Z.E.: 24 kWh Li-ion, 1543 kg, 185 km per charge, which is based on the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) combined cycle. Nissan Leaf: 24 kWh Li-ion, 1521 kg, 175 km per charge (based on the NEDC combined cycle).
Batteries of electric vehicles are presently selected by vehicle manufacturers to alleviate range anxiety and are sized to meet peak range expectations. That is, vehicle manufactures select or recommend batteries which exceed the everyday requirements of most drivers in order to inhibit occurrences where a driver will run out of energy at locations lacking nearby battery recharging stations. Accordingly, electric vehicles are designed with batteries that maximize the size of their market. For instance, vehicle manufactures ideally prefer to satisfy a wide range of typical driving distances, i.e., drivers that typically drive 10 km per day and also drivers that typically drive 100 km per day. The conventional battery selection model, however, results in inefficient use of the vehicle battery and unnecessarily increases the overall weight of the vehicle. Consequently, vehicles are typically installed with batteries providing suboptimal energy storage capacity.